Sometime in December Santosh Helekar stood on his podium and wrote this: "Prejudice by definition is a holier than thou judgment. Indeed, it is worse than a judgment. It is a prejudgment based on a belief in the superiority of one's own perceptions, anecdotal experiences and attitudes, or worse, based on nothing more than the color of someone's skin, his/her ethnicity, his/her religion or lack of it, food habits, dress patterns, etc." Yesterday or thereabout Santosh Helekar wrote this: "there is very little that is wrong with parenting in India or by Indian parents compared to western countries. All one has to do to know this is look at what has happened to parenting in the U.S. and other western countries." So tell us Santosh, how did you come to the conclusion that Western parenting was bad compared to Indian parenting? Did you conduct an extensive door-to-door, grant-funded survey on the matter? Did you control the several other variables besides parenting that go into forming complex human behaviour? Did you then form a hypothesis based on your findings and have it statistically tested and peer-reviewed, to make that statement? No, like your posts suggests, you took a look around and formed an opinion. Should we then base your opinion to be a prejudgement or bigotry based on "one's own perceptions, anecdotal experiences and attitudes, or worse, based on nothing more than the color of someone's skin, his/her ethnicity, his/her religion or lack of it, food habits, dress patterns, etc." The fact is human being take countless decisions every day of their lives based on the minutia of human interactions. They form opinions based on perception and anecdotal experience all the time. Infact, if I am not mistaken, psychological experiments are often based on a hypothesis formed of human opinion, which is then statistically tested.
So why the elaborate indignation when I accuse Indians of being dirty and the same sentiment expressed by Rajiv Desai a month later is met with agreement from you? There are many types of prejudice in this world. One of them is taking a dislike to a certain poster and then trying to needle them endlessly - a modus operandi, if you will. To reiterate, I do think Indians are dirty, incredibly unmindful of any civic responsibility. I also think Indians are survivors, intuitively intelligent, non-violent and incredibly hard-working. What do I base all this on? On mere observation, just like the rest of the world. To each his own prejudice. selma
